Speaking at the 21st Herzliya Conference at Reichman
University, Gantz said a major challenge for Israel is to return the southern
and northern residents back to their homes, even at the price of escalation.
He said he heard the reports about the Hezbollah threat to
bring down Israel’s electrical grid, and responded, “We can bring Lebanon
completely into the dark, and take apart Hezbollah’s power in days.”
The former defense minister and IDF chief of staff said the
price to “Israel will be heavy. We need to back up our institutions. We need to
be ready for major incidents of harm to the public. We should try to avoid it,
but if we need to do it, we cannot be deterred from it.
“We cannot let Hezbollah keep threats close to the northern
border,” he added, “We need to get the northern residents back by
September 01.”
Another challenge for Israel that Gantz discussed was
building a regional and global alliance against Iran.
“We still have the opportunity of normalization with the
Saudis and other states, to build what we started to build, the Middle East air
defense, to form a stranglehold on the Iranian axis,” he said.
He emphasized that Israel must work hard with the US to
build up Israel’s defenses and to be ready for ‘the Judgment Day’ of stopping
Iranian nuclear weapons.
A third challenge he noted was the long-term conflict with
Hamas, including the need for a political plan to replace the terror group’s
management of Gaza.
He pushed hard for a hostage deal, even at the cost of
ending the war for now.
Gantz noted that the US only killed Osama Bin Laden of
al-Qaeda in 2011, 10 years after 9/11, meaning that even a long ceasefire would
in no way mean that Israel would allow Gaza Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar to live
out his days without killing him.
Rather, he said, it was clear that Hamas would continue to
promote terror and their actions would give Israel the later excuse to
eliminate him and other top Hamas leaders.
In any event, he said it would take years to replace Hamas
at a governance level, but credited the IDF with destroying Hamas’s existing
military capacities.
Earlier
at the conference, Reichman University President Boaz Ganor said, “Hamas is a
tactical threat, Hezbollah is a strategic threat, and Iran is an existential
threat.”
He warned that Israel had fallen into Iran’s trap, spending
nine months fighting a player of minimal importance and wasting large amounts
of goodwill globally, while Tehran has mostly gotten to sit back and watch.
Further, he said Iran is playing long-term chess, with
Israel playing short-term poker. Ganor even argued that Iran knew more than
Israeli intelligence has said, meaning that it really did plan the entire
October 07 invasion.
In addition, he argued that Iran and Hezbollah’s denials of
knowing Hamas’s plans were also pre-coordinated.
He did not specifically say that Tehran knew the date of the
invasion, but Ganor has argued that Hamas was not sophisticated enough to pull
off the coordinated massive rocket attack land invasion simultaneously on its
own, nor was it capable of the extreme information security it undertook to
avoid the IDF detecting the moment of the invasion.
